Sleeping Beauties

 What to do when the Woodland Trust deliver 225 trees on the Friday you are moving home - and 6 days before Christmas?

Well after a rapid request for help and advice, it seems, you don't actually have to panic. It seems that, as with small children kids on Christmas Eve, if you are crafty, while the trees are sleeping you can tiptoe about, moved them around a little and they don't even notice what is going on. 

Unlike myself, the trees apparently, don't mind moving home a couple of times in quick succession. 

With previous tree deliveries, because the delivered trees were bare root stock (just twigs with their roots exposed and no soil or plant pots) , we have had to move quickly and plant them before the roots dry out and before the trees notice they have been uprooted from their first home. Realistically, this means planting the trees within a week (and they have usually had a couple of days on a couriers truck by the time they reach me). Even a week is a little risky if the trees haven't been perfectly packaged and kept in the a cool frost free environment. 

Earlier in the planting season, we have had to get 75+ trees in the ground in a single weekend. This was manageable but a bit pressured. 225 trees would definitely present a problem on house moving weekend. 

The saviour on this occasion (lets face it, I have had lots of saviours on this project already), was my good friend Caroline (and her husband Nick). Caroline is a very experienced gardener and has previously dealt with bulk tree deliveries when working for council Parks departments. She advised that we could dig a trench, pop the bunches of trees into the trench and gently "heel them in" - keeping the roots moist and below the frost level until we had time to plant them later on. We could effectively buy ourselves some time, and as long as we were careful, the trees wouldn't notice. As long as we dug them up and re-located them by spring time, we should be fine. 

So, armned with shovels, we headed to the bottom of the field where it was flat(ish) , free draining and sheltered *.  We were blessed with a fairly pleasant December day for our labours and with three of us taking turns (keeping a safe COVID distance) we dug a trench perhaps 1m wide by 2m long. 

* Note : the site turned out to be rabbit central - something I only discovered during the snow a few weeks later - paw prints and rabbit poo being a little more visible in the white stuff. 

225 trees wrapped in polythene to keep the roots damp.

It surprised me how little space 225 young trees can take up. It is amazing to think of their eventual volume of biomass compared to the tiny bundle this winter. 

Handily the Woodland Trust deliver was made up of bundles of 25 trees, this meant we could plant them in individual bunches and retrieve them in small batches for each future planting session (more about those later). 

We had 50x crab apple, 50x hawthorn, 50x hazel, 50x birch and 25x dog rose to look after. 

All of this delivery were quite small species that don't grow too tall, they would be useful for the south side of the field where I wish to protect the view a little. The Woodland Trust had specifically chosen these species to benefit the local wildlife. Birds and insects would love them. I will be sourcing some taller species later in the winter for the North and West boundaries. 

Caroline advised that if we planted the bunches of trees at a 45 degree angle (laid with the prevailing wind direction) they would be less likely to be damaged by any winter storms that come through. This would also mean we didn't need to dig so deeply to retrieve them in a few weeks time. 

9 bunches of 25 trees being put back into bed. 

The trench didn't need to be too deep - only really as deep as the roots of each bunch of trees when laid at an angle. We laid each bunch out in the reverse order that we would need them - so we would be picking from the top of the pile each time without disturbing the ones below. 

Once the trees were tucked in safely, our work was done. Caroline suggested we could save ourselves some labour by using the trench again next year if we need to. I am not sure we will ever have a delivery of such large numbers of trees in the future, but its good to know how to manage things if we do. If we don't re-use the trench, the scar on the land will be another great location to sprinkle wild flower seed. 

It was a relief to know that there was far less time pressure to plant now. We could wait for the days when the weather was kind, or for days when we had people who wanted to come and do some planting. 

Thanks Caroline & Nick for your generous time and advise. It was a good learning experience and I was able to spend most of the weekend moving house instead of panicking.